Two-hour queues to enter and more sales than before the Covid: the Book Fair is out of control

“Is Enrique gone?” Asks a woman with a suffocated expression, who looks into the booth of the Renacimiento publishing house in search of a signature of Enrique Gallud Jardiel, author of How to be cultured in ten days.

“He just left,” the editor replied. Christina Linares-. But wait a second I’m going to call him to see if he’s still around and can get closer.

The lady says that she comes from Cuenca and that he’s been queuing for two hours, a queue that snakes from before the monument to General Martínez Campos, turns at the Puerta de Madrid and descends narrow and impatient along the Paseo de Fernán Núñez, more than a kilometer in total, until it reaches the entrance of the book Fair, which in this eighty edition presents a never seen before: capacity control with billboards and red numbers that this Saturday afternoon reached 99%. No one else could fit, only 3,900 people at a time.

Any luck. Gallud Jardiel suddenly appears out of nowhere and signs the copy that is demanded of him. But many of those who wanted to doodle and salute from JJ Benítez, Blue Jeans, Maria Dueñas, Eloy Moreno O Miguel Angel Revilla, the most demanded, will not have been so lucky. The Book Fair of the reunion after the pandemic, which the authors say is the most special of all, is the one that distributes the most patience: huge lines to enter the booths, and more lines inside for the dedication hunters.

Access control baffles the writers themselves. Santiago Posteguillo, sped up and lost like a Roman legionary who just hung up the gladius and he does not know very well what to do, he asks, hidden behind a visor, where is the entrance of the authors, who is late to sign. He is talking on the phone and saying that he has nothing left, do not worry that he is not going to show up late to the battle with the readers, in which he accompanies him Sandra Barneda, the finalist of the Last Planet and presenter of The island of temptations, to which they ask for more photos than signatures.

It is strange because it is autumn and not spring and the Retreat is full of books and booths – less than in previous years – more than two years later, again of illusion. But the change of dates causes a novel effect: the shelves of bookstores and publishers are loaded with the new publications of the rentrée after the summer: Fernando Aramburu and Swifts (Tusquets), Manuel Vilas and The kisses (Planet), Julia Navarro and From nowhere (Plaza & Janés), Antonio Muñoz Molina and Back to where (Seix Barral), and so on.

Perhaps that explains a symptom that some booksellers have noticed in the first two days of the fair: that things are going very well, that is selling a lot, even more than in the editions prior to the pandemic, when the 75% capacity was not even in the novels and the booths were not put in the middle of the walk, in which many do not notice the resignation of those involved .

The health of the book, beyond this contest that there was so much desire, seems very good. A report presented this week at the Edita Forum in Barcelona foreshadowed an increase of up to 23% in the sector at the end of the year. The publishing world is taking off after the doldrums of the pandemic, and it is only necessary to walk through the Madrid Book Fair, before which greedy omens were already announced, to verify that the numbers are a palpable reality.

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